Posts Tagged ‘Steven Soderbergh’

Damon Was Robbed

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

I was surfing through the channels earlier and I saw that Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! was on, so I decided to watch a few minutes.  I wound up watching about an hour of the movie because I got so wrapped up in Matt Damon’s lead performance.  I’ve long felt that Damon was one of the best young actors we have, but he just keeps getting better.  What he does in The Informant! has such a high degree of difficulty.  The tone of the performance is so perfectly calculated and one wrong note could throw the whole thing off.

But the point is that Damon was nominated for an Oscar last year…for Invictus.  I mean, Damon is fine in that movie and does a convincing South African accent, but I don’t understand how 1) that was only his second acting nomination and the first since Good Will Hunting and 2) that he was shut out for The Informant!.  It is astounding to me that Damon’s work in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Rounders, The Departed, and The Good Shepherd all went unrecognized by the Academy.

One of our best

This year, though, I just don’t see how Colin Firth (A Single Man) and Morgan Freeman (Invictus) got nominated ahead of Damon’s masterful performance.  Damon is objectively better than those two and he’s better than George Clooney in Up in the Air (although I don’t begrudge that nomination).  It almost seems to me that either there is a conspiracy against nominating Matt Damon in the acting categories or the majority of the Academy is stupid (the more likely explanation).

Damon should have three films coming out before the end of the year: True Grit, Hereafter, and The Adjustment Bureau.  That’s three chances for the Academy to screw up.